MobileIron gives us confidence that we can extend our business to any corner of the world as quickly as we need to,” concludes Aitken. “The strong partnerships with DTAG and MobileIron will enable us to deliver more as our business demands innovation.

Stewart Aitken,
Head of Consumer IT in Group, Operations IT

Standard Life Group (Standard Life plc and its subsidiaries) (“Standard Life”) is a leading long-term savings and investments organisation headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland. Established in 1825, Standard Life has 6,500 employees around the world. The Group includes businesses which operate across the UK, Europe, North America, Asia and Australia looking after around 4.5 million customers worldwide, while supporting another 20 million customers through its joint ventures. At the end of December 2014 the Group had total assets under administration of over £296bn.

When it comes to helping its employees do their jobs effectively, Standard Life thinks differently—especially when it comes to technology. As the company changes its processes for greater efficiency and effectiveness worldwide, it seeks to deploy the new devices that can support its new ways of doing business.

Standard Life recently realised that if it wanted to empower its global workforce to use their mobile devices for more than email and calendaring, it would need to move off of its existing enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution. The company went looking for a more robust EMM solution—and selected MobileIron and Deutsche Telekom AG (DTAG) as providers for a highly sophisticated EMM solution. With the MobileIron platform in place, Standard Life is letting 2,000 mobile employees around the world access corporate documents and files from anywhere and is giving users secure access to consume content on Microsoft SharePoint. With the aim to extend the solution to many more employees, the result is people have a better work/life balance that allows them the flexibility to get their job done remotely.

Extensible Platform Supports an Expanding Mobile Strategy

Like many organizations, Standard Life sees the surge in mobile technology as an opportunity to help its employees be more effective—but it wants to be sure it can deploy devices as securely and efficiently as possible. With this in mind, Standard Life evaluated and tested numerous leading systems before choosing MobileIron and DTAG as trusted mobility partners. Other leading EMM platforms could not deliver a solution that met Standard Life’s needs with regards to data security and usability in their Proof of Concepts.

“Part of my team’s role is to identify better ways of working and provide new tools and guidance to help our employees be more effective and their working lives easier,” explains Stewart Aitken, Head of Consumer IT in Group Operations IT, Standard Life. “That’s why we went looking for a platform that would go beyond simply securing our email. We spoke to many suppliers but with MobileIron and DTAG, we were able to form a trusting partnership right away.”

The company then performed a proof of concept to make sure it had found the best solution. In particular, MobileIron’s AppConnect framework and network of partners impressed Standard Life’s technical staff, as did the solution’s support and highly secure infrastructure offered by Deutsche Telekom for compliance in a heavily regulated financial services industry.

“We knew that with MobileIron there are opportunities to extend the platform beyond the value it delivered out of the box,” says Aitken. “For example, our previous solution offered annotation capabilities but only through a third party. With MobileIron we knew we could build that right into the platform and extend it to all users.”

Emails and Calendaring Were Just the Beginning

To uninstall its previous MDM platform and replace it with MobileIron, Standard Life worked closely with its technology partner Deutsche Telekom to develop and execute a disciplined project plan. As a result, Standard Life went live with a secure, hosted solution from Deutsche Telekom and began rolling out mobile capabilities to 2000 users across its global workforce. As the investment business plans its next phase to migrate away from using BlackBerry devices to iOS devices that number may increase soon by 600. Thanks to their deep know-how concerning back-end integration Deutsche Telekom was able to provide Standard Life with broad support in all questions arising in the set-up process of the solution.

Through MobileIron Web@Work, Standard Life is now providing a much more satisfying and productive browsing experience to its many users of corporate-issued iPads and employee-owned Android and iOS devices. Employees can now access file server data securely from anywhere, boosting their efficiency. Using MobileIron Docs@Work, Standard Life is increasing SharePoint adoption across its workforce. Employees can now consume content securely through Deutsche Telekom’s secure servers to be viewed on SharePoint. As the company continues to roll out SharePoint worldwide, some departments are using Priority Folders feature as a temporary solution for pushing documents securely to specific users.

To make that happen DTAG provides the necessary infrastructure for Standard Life via a professional data centre and takes care of the operation of MobileIron’s EMM Software. While Standard Life administrates its users and the devices of the users, DTAG performs regular backups of the customer’s data base as well as regular updates of MobileIron’s software when a new release is available.

“I look at MobileIron as a platform that lets us ask, “Where can we go next and how many capabilities can we roll out to get there?’” says Aitken. “The MobileIron EMM system has taken us much, much further than just email and calendaring, while we experience the benefits of Deutsche Telekom as the service provider who understands the importance of the system for Standard Life and has the deep know-how, which is necessary to supports us.”

As Standard Life aims to empower its global workforce with the mobile technology they need to be productive, MobileIron AppConnect enables the company to secure its most important enterprise applications. For example, Standard Life is in the final testing phase of HP ePrint which will give employees the flexibility to securely print from any iOS mobile device.

“Work/life balance is a big topic of discussion for many businesses these days,” explains Aitken. “MobileIron has made a huge difference in how our employees operate. Instead of needing to find a connection to our network to get their work done, employees can now go through DTAG’s systems to get the data and applications they need from just about anywhere.”

Standard Life’s newfound ability to increase employee productivity was never more apparent than when the company recently opened a new satellite office in the Asia-Pacific region. Providing an IT infrastructure to give employees access to the company network could have taken days. Instead, Standard Life gave its employees in the office mobile devices that enabled them to access corporate email and data through MobileIron from day one.

“MobileIron gives us confidence that we can extend our business to any corner of the world as quickly as we need to,” concludes Aitken. “The strong partnerships with DTAG and MobileIron will enable us to deliver more as our business demands innovation.’”